r
knew just how persistent Andy Dufresne could be until much later.
In May of 1950, the powers that be decided that the roof of the licence-plate factory
ought to be resurfaced with roofing tar. They wanted it done before it got too hot up
there, and they sued for volunteers for the work, which was planned to take about a week.
More than seventy men spoke up, because it was outside work and May is one damn fine
month for outside work. Nine or ten names were drawn out of a hat, and two of them
happened to be Andy's and my own.
For the next week we'd be marched out to the exercise yard after breakfast, with two
guards up front and two more
behind ... plus all the guards in the towers keeping a weather
eye on the proceedings through their field-glasses for good
measure.
Four of us would be carrying a big extension ladder on those morning marches -1 always
got a kick out of the way Dickie Betts, who was on that job, called that sort of ladder an
extensible - and we'd put it up against the side of that low, lit building. Then we'd start
bucket-brigading hot buckets of tar up to the roof. Spill that shit on you and you'd
jitterbug all the way to the infirmary.
There were six guards on the project, all of them picked on the basis of seniority. It was
almost as good as a week's vacation, because instead of sweating it out in the laundry or
the plate-shop or standing over a bunch of cons cutting pulp or brush somewhere out in
the willy wags, they were having a regular May holiday in the sun, just sitting there with
their backs up against the low parapet, shooting the bull back and forth.
They didn't even have to keep more than half an eye on us, because the south wall sentry
post was close enough so that rte fellows up there could have spit their chews on us, if
ihsy'd wanted to. If anyone on the roof-sealing party had made one funny move, it would
take four seconds to cut him smack in two with .45 calibre machine-gun bullets. So those
screws just sat there and took their ease. All they needed was a couple of six-packs
buried in crushed ice, and they would have been the lords of all creation.
One of them was a fellow named Byron Hadley, and in :hat year of 1950, he'd been at
Shawshank longer than I had. Longer than the last two wardens put together, as a matter
of "act. The fellow running the show in 1950 was a prissy-looking downcast Yankee
named George Dunahy. He had a degree in penal administration. No one liked him, as far
as I could tell, except the people who had gotten him his appointment. I heard that he
wasn't interested in anything but compiling statistics for a book (which was later
published by a small New England outfit called Light Side Press, where he probably had
to pay to have it done), who won the intramural baseball championship each September,
and getting a death-penalty law passed in Maine. A regular bear for the death-penalty was
George Dunahy. He was fired off the job in 1953, when it came out he was running a
discount auto repair service down in the prison garage and splitting the profits with Byron
Hadley and Greg Stammas. Hadley and Stammas came out of that one okay - they were
old hands at keeping their asses covered - but Dunahy took a walk. No one was sorry to
see him go, but nobody was exactly pleased to see Greg Stammas step into his shoes,
either. He was a short man with a tight, hard gut and the coldest brown eyes you ever
saw. He always had a painful, pursed little grin on his face, as if he had to go to the
bathroom and couldn't quite manage it. During Stammas's tenure as warden there was a
lot of brutality at Shawshank, and although I have no proof, I believe there were maybe
half a dozen moonlight burials in the stand of scrub forest that lies east of the prison.
Dunahy was bad, but Greg Stammas was a cruel, wretched, cold-hearted man.
He and Byron Hadley

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